Many people assume that the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) is committed to fighting antisemitism and other forms of racial bigotry. After all, it bills itself as a civil rights organization and throughout its long history, it has battled housing discrimination against people of color and challenged racist groups including White Citizens Councils. Nonetheless, Emmaia Gelman, founding director of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, argues that this reputation is unwarranted.
Her latest book, The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State, traces the history of the 113-year-old organization from its founding by German-Jewish immigrants in the United States to the present.
During the early nineteenth century, hundreds of thousands of German Jews emigrated to the United States, thanks to the poverty and repression that followed the twenty-three-year-long Napoleonic Wars. Many of them, Gelman writes, prized assimilation into mainstream America and did well in their new homeland. In fact, Gelman reports that by 1880 they comprised “a fairly solid phalanx of comfortable, middle-class merchants.” Some German Jews, she writes, were even elected to public office during this time, while others made a social impact through philanthropy and other forms of civic engagement.
But the arrival of two million Eastern European Jews to the United States between 1881 and 1914—people fleeing brutal antisemitic pogroms and discrimination in the Russian Empire—threatened to upend the social position of established German-Jewish communities. “German-Jewish leaders viewed the new immigrants as racially ‘other,’ uncivilized and dangerously disloyal to state order,” Gelman writes. The reason was blatantly political: “Some of the new immigrants had been involved in revolutionary movements before emigrating; others were radicalized by their experiences of violence and exploitation.” Even more disturbingly, they bristled when the new arrivals responded to racism and labor exploitation by forming organizations to push back against abuse, organizing mass protests, and making clear that their alliance lay with the working classes rather than the capitalist elite.
Moreover, these positions alienated—or perhaps simply offended—the leaders of a Zionist cultural and service group called B’nai B’rith, who in turn became instrumental in creating the ADL. Their desire, Gelman writes, was to preserve “the political conservatism of the wealthy class,” and they hoped to rein in the unapologetically anarchist, communist, and socialist Jews who they saw as far too brash and militant.
Since then, the ADL’s allegiance to the rich and powerful has never wavered; Gelman documents its consistent support of business interests and Zionism, albeit couched beneath a thin veneer of civil rights advocacy. At the crux of its work, she writes, has been consistent opposition to left critiques of American capitalism, focusing instead on two core priorities: to “counter communist messaging that capitalism brought inequality and racism,” and to refute the idea that “communism was the correct framework for racial justice.” Both notions, she explains, have been posited by the organization as contrary to Jewish values.
University of California Press
University of California Press, 324 pages. Publication date: June 16, 2026.
Unsurprisingly, support for Israel has always fit snugly into ADL efforts, and arguments about the safety purportedly provided by the Zionist state have long been a central feature of its advocacy. For many decades, the ADL’s assertion that Israel keeps world Jewry safe was widely accepted by political leaders and the Jewish and non-Jewish public. But while civil rights proponents promoted dignity for people of all religions, colors, and creeds, the ADL’s position as a self-proclaimed civil rights advocacy organization has put members of the movement in a predicament since supporting the ADL’s work to contest anti-Semitism meant ignoring its relationship with international law enforcement agencies that were surveilling leftwing activists at the time, and disincentivized them from acknowledging the 1948 Nakba and ongoing Zionist atrocities against the Palestinian people.
“Since the 1960s,” Gelman writes, “the ADL has not solely feared the Black liberationist expansions of the civil rights movement, the anti-Vietnam war movement, the Palestinian solidarity movement, the student movement, and the anti-capitalist counterculture. . . . Rather, it has expanded its own role as disciplinarian beyond Jewish communities.”
Indeed, Gelman notes that the ADL has historically viewed the global left wing as dangerous, and characterized progressives as “just as racist, hateful, and extreme as the right.” The group’s view of leftwing animus toward Israel—which it saw as “a product of totalitarian, anti-democratic positions” rather than opposition to the oppression of Palestinians—has led it to habitually conflate anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, particularly on college campuses where support for Gaza and Palestinian sovereignty have flourished.
Indeed, since the events of October 7, 2023, the ADL has doubled down on its uncritical support of Israel and its demonization of those who support Palestinian autonomy, even as pro-Palestinian faculty and students have faced suspension or expulsion on college campuses across the country, and members of Students for Justice in Palestine have been arrested and detained. Gelman describes this as “gesturing back to the Americanism of [the ADL’s] founding.” She quotes ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, who affirmed the organization’s affinities in a 2025 address to Republican officials. “There is a straight line, there’s a throughline, from Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter, to ‘defund the police,’ to ‘river to the sea,” Greenblatt said. “They are the same people, these are the same kind of nihilists promoting a kind of anarchy. . . They’re not just opposed to Jews. . . .They’re opposed to the West, they’re opposed to capitalism, they’re opposed to America.”
This is a shocking statement, particularly coming from someone who presents himself as a civil and human rights champion—and it replicates arguments heard in MAGA circles. But thanks to The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State, we know that it is part and parcel of the ADL’s century-long effort to support U.S. empire and suppress substantive social change.
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to clarify the emigration of hundreds of thousands of German Jews to the United States occurred in the early nineteenth century.